The Four Seasons: A Novel of Vivaldi's Venice Read online

  On a table near the door to the balcony, a bowl was filled with pomegranate blossoms. One soloist had a few of the delicate flowers tucked in front of her ear, and the other figlie di coro were finding spots for them in the bodices of their dresses.

  Agata, a figlia with a voice low enough to sing baritone, picked up a sprig and tucked it into Chiaretta’s hair. “Are you scared?”

  “No,” Chiaretta said, her voice coming out in a croak. A few of the figlie smirked.

  “Cough a few times and try again,” Agata said. Chiaretta had to force her voice out as if she were coming down with a cold, but other than that it sounded almost normal.

  “It happens a lot when you’re new.” Agata put Chiaretta through one of their daily solfeggio exercises, running up and down the scales two octaves below Chiaretta, changing keys and adding flourishes with each new run.

  The maestra clapped, and Chiaretta followed Agata and the other figlie through a small door and onto the narrow balcony where two years before she had first sung with Michielina. She leaned forward to peer through the gauze covering the iron grate. The church was crowded, and an anticipatory hush filtered up to the balcony at the sound of the coro taking their places.

  “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,” the celebrant called out as he approached the altar. “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam,” “To God, the joy of my youth,” the choir replied. Chiaretta had sung her first notes. She looked over at Agata, who nodded.

  After the confession, it was time for the Kyrie, the first real music for the coro. Two violins and a cello led in, and Chiaretta took a breath, joining the chorus in an explosive “Kyrie!” They repeated the word, stretching out each syllable as long as they could manage on one breath before moving on to the next word. “Eleison,” they sang in staccato syllables before their voices fell away.

  A soloist stood on one end of the balcony. She took a small step forward as the accompaniment died down to a violin and cello continuo. Her voice pierced the air with a single note she held out like a precious jewel before continuing the melody.

  As the orchestra reentered, Chiaretta gazed across the chapel to a painting of Mary and tried to imagine what it would be like to have that soft, full body envelop her. Then the chorus picked up again and she entered the clean, pure wash of sound. “Kyrie eleison,” “Lord have mercy,” they repeated, as Chiaretta willed her voice to take wing and soar across the chapel to the Blessed Virgin, who heard the prayers of the faithful even when they were hidden inside the singing of a choir.

  Without her violin, Maddalena’s thoughts darkened. All she wanted was to crawl into bed and do nothing. The following Sunday, when the regular figlie di coro had recovered enough to resume their duties, Chiaretta’s mood was equally glum as they walked around the courtyard at recreation time.

  “I hate it here,” Chiaretta said.

  “You don’t really. You’re just bored,” Maddalena retorted. “And anyway, tell me where you’d rather be.”

  Chiaretta went in seconds from being slumped with dejection to making a twirling circle in front of her sister. “I would be onstage! An opera singer!”

  Maddalena burst out laughing. “How do you know about that? And what part is there for a girl who isn’t even ten?”

  “I don’t mean now,” Chiaretta said. “When I am a grown lady. There’s a girl, Antonia Morosini, who comes for lessons, then goes home. Do you know her?”

  Maddalena shook her head.

  “Her father’s part of the Congregazione, and she lives on the Grand Canal. She says there are lots of women in Venice who have dozens of beautiful dresses. Some of them sing in the opera, and some of them— Well, I guess their job is just to be beautiful so men will want to take care of them. I’m not sure how it works.”

  “Just be beautiful? That’s not a job.”

  “Operas have people dressed like gods who get dropped down from the ceiling on clouds,” Chiaretta went on, ignoring Maddalena’s comment. “Antonia goes all the time. She says it’s wonderful!” She twirled again as she sang the last word.

  “Chiaretta, calm down if you want more than bread and water for dinner.”

  “All right,” she groaned. “But if I can’t sing in the opera, then I’ll marry a rich man.”

  “Marry the doge—I don’t care—but please don’t get us in trouble!”

  Chiaretta sighed and resumed their stroll. “Maddalena?” she said a few seconds later. “Do you think it will happen? I don’t want to stay here forever.”

  Maddalena looked away but said nothing. If I can’t play the violin, I have no idea what I want, she thought, shutting her eyes to try to empty her mind. Chiaretta stared, waiting for an answer to her question, but none came.

  Soon Chiaretta moved on to the adolescent ward and again slept next to her sister. She had earned a small amount of money for her performance with the choir—enough, when added to the pittance her limited skills in the silk workshop had yielded in her time there, to buy a small sketchbook and pencils similar to ones Maddalena had bought a few months before. However small, each of Maddalena’s possessions seemed like a way she had carved out a life separate from her sister. The sketchbook, already half full of drawings of angels with beautiful wings and the flowers that grew in the cracks between the stones in the courtyard, was her most prized possession.

  “How will we tell them apart?” Chiaretta asked when she unwrapped her package and saw that, having been bought from the same shop, her notebook was indistinguishable from her sister’s.

  Maddalena put a lace bookmark in hers to know it at a glance, but the next day she still pulled out the wrong one from the cassone they shared. Sitting on the edge of her cot, she drew a sketch of Chiaretta’s sleeping face in her own book, then wrote underneath it, “I have an idea,” forming each letter with the slow deliberation that came from having few opportunities to practice writing.

  Chiaretta was enchanted with the sketch. Forgetting the rules, she opened her mouth, but Maddalena put her finger to her lips. She reached for her sister’s sketchbook, feigning a scribble with a quizzical look, to ask her permission to write. Chiaretta nodded.

  “I see girls passing books when we can’t talk. We can do that too.”

  Maddalena handed the book to her sister.

  With the tip of her tongue showing between her teeth, Chiaretta wrote back. “You are the most”—she crossed out a word and tried to spell it again—“maganifacint sister. Now I wont explod before I can tell you my sicrets.”

  Chiaretta had been in the priora’s office only once before, on the day of the fight at the bridge. This time, she was brought by a figlia di commun who had summoned her from her lessons. There, a middle-aged man sat chatting with the priora and the maestra of the vocalists of the coro.

  “Enchanting,” he said when Chiaretta entered. “Even prettier than I had been told. A fine Venetian face, broad across the forehead, with a mind behind it to match and eyes to break men’s hearts.” He paused. “Do you know who I am?”

  The priora rushed to answer for her. “He’s one of the Nobili Uomini Deputati,” she said. “Part of the Congregazione. The ones we pray for at dinner.” She arched her eyebrows to convey she expected Chiaretta would know what to say.

  “We are very grateful to you,” Chiaretta said, bowing her head. What had he said? Something about a mind and breaking men’s hearts? I’m only ten, she thought. I must have misunderstood.

  “I heard you sing in the chapel and I asked myself, Who is that tiny girl I can barely see—the one in the white dress making all that noise?”

  Figlie were punished for making noise. Chiaretta’s eyes darted in alarm toward the priora.

  “Beautiful noise, I should say,” he added, seeing her distress.

  The maestra did not approve of having young girls’ heads turned in this fashion. “He has come to hear you sing,” she said with a frown. “Sing the Amen we rehearsed this week.”

  Chiaretta glowered. Like other f
iglie at her stage of training, she was to shadow the attive, gaining experience by learning the music they learned and rehearsing with them. When the maestra told Chiaretta that even though she had done a good job filling in she would not be performing again soon, Chiaretta had become sullen and restless in rehearsals and had not bothered to learn any of the music very well. The threat of having her hair chopped off and spending several days in solitary confinement had brought her into line, but the maestra’s expression showed that she had a good memory of where they had left things.

  “Brava!” The man clapped when she finished. He pulled some sheet music from his jacket. “Can you sight-read?”

  The maestra bristled. “All our girls can. Surely you know it is one of their regular lessons.”

  “Of course, but she is so young, I thought perhaps...” He handed several sheets to Chiaretta. “Would you try this?”

  The maestra snatched it away and read the title. “This is an aria from an opera,” she said. “Excellency, it is quite inappropriate. And besides, this is in Italian.” She looked over to the priora for support. “The figlie di coro sing only in Latin.”

  “Maestra, she does not need to sing the words anyway. I would be happy just to hear her vocalize the notes.”

  “But still, the source...”

  “Indulge me.”

  The maestra tightened her lips and handed the music to Chiaretta.

  “Do it again,” the man said when she finished. “And I’d like to hear it with a lute.” The priora clapped, and the young girl who came in was told to fetch one from the sala.

  Chiaretta knew when the maestra was angry, because the skin on her neck grew blotchy. Now the color was spreading upward to her cheeks. When the lute arrived, she picked it up and, without saying anything, began to play a simple accompaniment while Chiaretta vocalized.

  “Delightful,” the man said, applauding, when they finished. “And now, Maestra, tell me what you need, to compensate for the trouble I’ve put you to.”

  “Coal for the fire,” she responded almost before he had finished asking, as if she had a mental list at the ready for any such occasion. “There is never enough to keep the girls’ throats open. And more lamp oil for the music copyists. We always ask for the same things, but we are never given enough.”

  If he heard her subtle rebuke of the Congregazione’s parsimony, he did not acknowledge it. “I’ll make the request myself,” he said.

  He nodded toward Chiaretta. “It’s good to see the Pietà’s future so well assured.”

  By dinnertime the maestra had notified Chiaretta she would be going with the figlie di coro to a picnic on the lagoon island of Torcello in two weeks’ time. It would be better if the honor went to a more deserving girl, a properly behaved girl who learned her music, the maestra told her, but the Congregazione obviously did not understand her position. Chiaretta would be putting on her ivory silk dress again sooner than she had thought.

  SIX

  To the figlie di commun, the congregazione were a shadowy group they could not name and whose faces they would not recognize. Men did not come inside the cloister except under the rarest of circumstances. Nevertheless, the Congregazione were just one step below the saints in importance.

  Only the figlie di coro knew them at all. Gondolas picked up small groups at the dock in front of the Pietà a few times a month, to take them to sing and play at parties in the homes of the noble families of Venice. Chiaretta had watched with jealousy and longing as the older figlie di coro came back with stories about the beauty of the homes and the charm of the hosts, and complaining of stomachaches from all the food.

  The best stories they brought back involved flirtations with the guests. Chiaretta had already heard about several marriages of figlie to men who first heard them in the chapel and later found that their beauty and charm were a match for their voices. For every such story, however, others found their chances dashed by crooked teeth, or pocked skin, or a limp. Many of them were never invited to parties at all.

  At first Chiaretta had assumed the figlie would be punished for flirting, but she saw instead that the ones who could please in this fashion received more invitations than the rest. Why this would be so she wasn’t certain, except that the older girls talked from time to time about how an event at which one or another of them made a big impression had led to a pledge of a large sum of money to the coro.

  At her age, what most interested Chiaretta was the food. Sometimes, when no one was looking, she clutched her belly as she had seen Caterina do, whispering, “I never ate so much in my life,” and trying to imagine what such a feeling might be like. And now, much sooner than she had expected, she had gotten her first invitation to put her fantasy to the test.

  In the sala where the singers took their lessons, Chiaretta had made friends with Antonia Morosini, a Venetian girl her own age. Her father was one of the three most important men to the coro, a member of the Nobili Uomini Deputati charged with overseeing the music program at the Pietà.

  “My father talked about you all week!” Antonia said when she next saw Chiaretta. Noticing her friend’s puzzled look, she went on. “You know—the man who listened to you sing.”

  “That was your father?”

  “Silly! Of course it was! The way he talked about you, I think if he didn’t already have two daughters he would bring you home. Or maybe just throw us in the canal and take you instead.”

  Antonia giggled, but Chiaretta could not see the humor. More than anything she wanted to be Antonia, wanted her silk dresses, the silver filigreed band holding back her hair, her confident laughter, her freedom to move about in the world.

  “It’s because of him you get to come with us to Torcello next week,” Antonia went on.

  “You’re coming?” Chiaretta had assumed the picnic would be a small event attended by only a few members of the Congregazione, the figlie di coro, and their chaperones.

  “Of course!” Antonia began to prattle on about tables of meats, fruits, cakes, and sweet wine; musicians and games; and chances to walk along the canal path to chase butterflies and listen to birds.

  What Antonia described was so far beyond Chiaretta’s experience that she almost couldn’t take in her friend’s words. In the five years she had lived at the Pietà, Chiaretta had been outside perhaps ten times. She loved riding in the gondolas, peeking through the curtains and watching the boats carrying fish, vegetables, or even furniture up and down the canals. One time she had seen a wedding gondola festooned with flowers, and another time a special one for funerals, with its felce draped in black and a casket visible inside. The Grand Canal was a world of constant activity and openness, whereas life at the Pietà was more like the scenes on the carved altar in the chapel, in which dozens of figures were crammed for all eternity into one frozen space.

  The most recent time she had been out was to the church of the Frari to see Titian’s painting of the Assumption of the Virgin. On the way, she had paused to stare at the colors in a greengrocer’s stall. The artichokes were purple as bruised skin, and the peapods were fuzzy as caterpillars. The chaperone had dragged her away before the man inside could meet Chiaretta’s gaze.

  “If you look at them, they look back at you,” she had said. “It isn’t proper.” She’d shaken her finger. “You behave, Chiaretta,” she’d said, “or you won’t be coming out again.”

  That trip had been several months before. As the figlie neared puberty, they went out less, and after they reached it, unless they were in the coro, they rarely went out at all. Dull and getting duller was Chiaretta’s assessment of her life after her fleeting taste of singing with the choir, and the last week had been even worse because Anna Maria was in the infirmary with a stomach ailment and she had missed seeing her in the practice rooms.

  Chiaretta came into the ward for the rest period and saw that Maddalena’s back was turned away, and she appeared to be asleep.

  She lay down but got up as soon as she was allowed and began to write a
note to her sister.

  I saw Antonia today and she is comming to the party. She says there will be games and more food than I have ever sen. She is bringing a nett for us to catch buterflies. If I can, I’ll bring you one.

  Maddalena stirred and turned over. Her face was blotchy, and her hair was pasted to her cheeks as if it had been wet. “What’s wrong?” Chiaretta whispered, looking around to see if she had been overheard.

  Maddalena shook her head, tears welling up in her eyes. Chiaretta handed her sister her sketchbook and pencil, agonizing while Maddalena wrote with violent strokes.

  Susana cracked her bow, and Luciana gave the one I use to her. She told her to leave it in the cabinet so I could use it too, but she didn’t look like she cared if she did or not.

  “Luciana is a devvil from hell,” Chiaretta wrote, showing her words to Maddalena before crossing them out so vigorously the marks dented the next two pages.

  Maddalena pasted on a smile as Chiaretta slipped on the ivory dress the morning of the picnic. An otherwise unnoticed growth spurt had left the waist already an inch too high and the hem too short. Maddalena had to tug hard on the laces to close the dress in the back, but Chiaretta was too distracted to care.

  In the stillness that followed her sister’s departure, Maddalena wrapped her arms around her chest to keep from dissolving with emptiness. The small amount of extra free time on Saturdays stretched before her less like a blessing than like an ordeal. Until then it had felt as if her life and Chiaretta’s were entwined into one existence, but now she could not deny that Chiaretta’s was taking its own path, one that wasn’t always going to include her.

  And her path? Best not to think too much about that. The sun had not risen quite high enough to brighten the sala dal violino, so Maddalena tapped her fingers around the inside of the cabinet where the maestra had told Susana to leave the bow. She tapped again. Maddalena felt heat pouring up through her chest into her neck and face. What am I supposed to do? Play pizzicato? She pictured Luciana’s spiteful face and remembered Chiaretta’s crossedout words. Luciana is a devil from hell, she thought. And despite all her prayers, the devil was winning.